questioning answers

LGBTQ

Following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, my Facebook feed blew up, as you can imagine. Among the hysteria, I found the different responses of religious institutions interesting, and I wanted to comment on a few of them. I’m going to largely pull from hierarchical/historical/organized Christian denominations. Continue reading →

I haven’t been posting much this year because it’s been hectic for me in my personal and professional life. But, my birthday is right around the corner and I often feel like my birthday is my New Year — I reflect on the previous year and how I’ve grown or stepped backward. One thing I’ve been thinking about is how much more empathetic I am since leaving conservative Christianity. Continue reading →

Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been “pushed out of the church.” That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out.

I loved this. The first area of my faith I dissented against was homosexuality. I’ve written about how I have LGBTQ people close to me in my life (here, here, and here), and I saw first hand how the homophobic positions of Catholicism (and other conservative forms of Christianity) negatively impacted their lives. It got to a point that I couldn’t in good conscience agree with my church’s approach to LGBTQ people. A couple years later, I realized that my church’s teachings on premarital sex and contraception had very real and very negative effects on my and my friends’ lives. So, I discarded those teachings as well. Continue reading →

The recent comments made by Pope Francis on gay marriage and contraception have made their way around the news circuit:

“The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life,” Francis said.

“He had the strength to defend openness to life at a time when many people were worried about population growth,” Francis said.

[…]

The comments also came less than a week after a speech to diplomats at the Vatican in which Francis criticized “legislation which benefits various forms of cohabitation rather than adequately supporting the family for the welfare of society as a whole,” saying that such legislation had contributed to a widespread sense of the family as “disposable.”

On contraception and Paul VI, Francis said in a November 2014 interview with an Italian newspaper that his predecessor’s “genius was prophetic.”

“He had the courage to stand against the majority, to defend moral discipline, to exercise a ‘brake’ on the culture, to oppose [both] present and future neo-Malthusianism,” he said.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Church’s treatment of LGBTQ people played a big role in my gradual fall away from the Church (of which I am still formally a member). After I became Catholic, I got to know a few people who identify as “celibate gays” – they fully acknowledge their sexual orientation but live “fully in accordance with the Church’s teaching on homosexuality” (that is, homosexual orientation is totally fine, but any and all gay sex acts are necessarily abominable to God). Coming from Evangelicalism, it was quite refreshing to see sexual orientation acknowledged as being real and that it was okay to identify as gay – very different from what I observed in Evagelicalism (case in point: some discomfort over Wheaton College hiring a celibate gay woman because she identifies as “gay”).

LGBTQ celibates have become a visible and vocal group within conservative Christianity in the last few years – the Washington Post even recently ran an article about these people. This gay celibacy movement is diverse – from chaste coupling to monasticism to singleness. But, as I’ve observed this growing movement, I’ve been growing largely uncomfortable with it. In response to the Washington Post article, Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington (D.C.) wrote a long-winded reflection on it: Continue reading →

I’m sorry this post is rambling and fragmented, but I’m trying to connect the dots in my shift in religious mindset.

Life occasionally brings those Oprah-style “aha moments.” I remember watching an episode of Rules of Engagement with my wife about two years and one child into our marriage. I never found the show that entertaining or funny, but it was one of the few shows at the time that we both liked to watch. Right after the episode was over, my wife initiated sex, something that didn’t happen a ton at the time. After the sex, I recognized a pattern – she initiated sex after every episode we watched as far back as I could recall. The insecure person I was at the time, I just had to know if it was Patrick Warburton or Oliver Hudson who was getting her all hot and bothered – and of course I couldn’t converse with her directly about this. So, the next time we watched the show, I was tuned in to her reactions to the show. But, I noticed something different, she was more focused on the show when Bianca Kajlich’s character was on the screen. I found Kajlich’s character, while attractive, to be the least funny on the show, but I noticed that my wife found all of Kajlich’s character’s jokes to be hilarious. And then, as usual, we had sex after watching the show. Continue reading →

In addition to exploring intellectual issues I have with Christianity – whether Jesus claimed to be God, reliability of biblical sources, etc., I want to explore the events in my life that made me question my faith. Among these are LGBTQ people in my life, marriage and parenthood, sex and purity culture, and feelings/emotions in regards to religious experiences. This post is in regards to a couple of my gay friends – I’ll post more in the future about how LGBTQ people deeply impacted my faith given how big of a role it played.

The divisions of political consequence today are not theological and ecclesiastical in character but the result of differing worldviews. That is to say, they no longer revolve around specific doctrinal issues or style of practice and organization but around our most fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to order our lives–our own lives and our lives together in this society.

[…] It is the commitment to different and opposing bases of moral authority and the world views that derive from them that creates the deep cleavages between antagonists in the contemporary culture war. As we will see, this cleavage is so deep that it cuts across the old lines of conflict, making the distinctions that long divided Americans–those between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews–virtually irrelevant.